The Queens of K-Town

By Angela Mi Young Hur

MACADAM CAGE; 275 PAGES; $23

Sixteen-year-old Cora Moon leaves Orange County for New York City with her father and younger sister. Her mother has returned to Korea to care for Cora's dying grandfather, leaving the family adrift. As she struggles to find her footing in New York, Cora discovers a new group of friends, three girls whose own lives have been hollowed out as well. These are the Queens of K-Town, and they will electrify Cora's melancholy, motherless existence.

Such a premise would furnish enough for one book, promising as it does strong themes of sex, family, ethnicity and adulthood - but this is less than a third of Angela Mi Young Hur's first novel, "The Queens of K-Town." It is a raw, giddy experiment in trauma narrative, a grand attempt to knit together those shards of selfhood and grief that a human being cannot hold in her heart. Lacerated by her own emotions, fractured by circumstance, Cora has a story even the author seems to have trouble constraining on the page.

K-Town is Manhattan's Korean neighborhood, several neon blocks of restaurants, shops and clubs that the girls claim as their stomping ground. Here, Cora's life reaches terminal velocity. Her nights with her new friends begin at 2 a.m., and her days with her sister and father become ever more foreshortened and strained. Violence and depression bloom beneath a veneer of alcohol, glamour and excitement, especially when the Queens become entangled with a K-Town gangster.

Hur intertwines this plot with yet another. Ten years later, Cora is visiting K-Town to recover from a failed relationship. Alone in the city, she stays in a friend's apartment, has an affair with another resident of the building and spends her evenings absorbed in online physics tutorials. Rootless again, still haunted by loneliness and unable to recover from the suicide of one of those summer friends a decade ago, Cora flails her way to the edge of taking her own life.

Much is made in "The Queens of K-Town" of the mechanics of falling bodies - the jump from a skyscraper to end up a smear on the sidewalk. Cora seeks some explanation for her failed relationship in her study of physics, determining that "the immovable bastard, whose actuality would necessitate an infinite inertia and thus an infinite mass, would collapse under his own self-involved gravity, thereby creating a poignant singularity." Such departures create a bizarre psycho-metaphorical journey into Cora's depression, echoing in some way the Delphic pronouncements of a character in a Thomas Pynchon story - though Hur's faux science seems flatter, in places desperately obvious once you puzzle through the syntax.

The book's odd chapters are written in Cora's voice, the even chapters in a slightly more removed third person describing her life at 26. But the two perspectives are effectively the same in the amount of access they grant to Cora's consciousness, leaving the reader to wonder what purpose they might actually serve. Many of the book's technical moves - the split perspectives, as well as the inclusion of the physics material - tend to confuse instead of offer entry into the story, lively as such diversions might be.

Hur, however, earns it all back. Her language is vivid, her sentences straining at conventional length and mannerliness. Her characters are intriguing and seem to glimmer and blaze on the page, most notably Cora's absent mother (who surfaces in a number of Cora's reveries) and the K-Town gang. Bev, their leader, is a half-German half-Korean live wire Cora encounters at a school party while having sex with Bev's on-and-off boyfriend, Kyle. She introduces Cora to Mina and Soo Young. Soo Young is older, an immigrant just arrived from Korea, while Mina is second-generation Korean American.

Soo Young, in turns solemn and surly, provides a perfect foil for Bev, whom Cora calls a "priestess of obscene self-will." Bev is a classic queen bee made over to suit the Manhattan multiethnic prep school scene, and she is both despicable and fascinating. Like Bev, and like the novel itself, Cora tends to throw hissy fits. At times it's annoying, at times amusing, and at times it reveals an unapologetic agony. "What is this place called Indiana?" she screams, lying on her grad school adviser's floor.

Hur spent a year completing "The Queens of K-Town" after receiving the Sparks Prize from the graduate program in creative writing at Notre Dame. All the elements of a beautiful and ambitious novel are in place - if only they were more neatly sewn together, if only the structure were more solid. Still, the real joy of the book lies in its insouciance and its unabashed velocity. Hur's is a strident, inventive new voice.